To digress slightly from my usual blogging subjects, I came across a very interesting model today, which attempts a grand conceptualization excercise. Rather grandly titled "The Grand Collaboration Convergence", it attempts to make sense of the chaotic mix of saas solutions marketed as "online collaboration" software.

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The model identifies the broad fronts from which companies are approaching the "online collaboration" market. for example some are primarily "project management solutions" like BaseCamp, others wiki based like PBWorks, and others mainly "enterprise social networking solutions" like Jive.

The different approaches are attempts to find the right "collaboration mix" – identification of core collaboration needs in an organization, incorporattion of successful lessons from consumer social software, and finding the "stickyness" which makes a software succeed inside an organization and across organizations.

And these solutions dont serve their primary focus area. Other collaboration tools are wrapped around this focus area, as that is seen as the optimum design. For example, BaseCamp, which is mainly a project management solution also includes document management functionality. Box.net, which is mainly positioned for "document management" also includes group workspaces.

The model also identifies a distinct trend towards "convergence", where solutions are moving towards a convergence or "total collaboration" point, where ever greater functional areas are sought to be integrated in a single suite. Indeed, Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS reflect this, where messaging, collaboration and web conferencing features are offered in a single suite. Concentric circles represent an ever greater convergence, and the solutions closest to the center are the most comprehensive.

If nothing else, the model is a good representation of the positioning of different solutions in the market.